Studying the demography of developer ecosystems

Abstract

Demography is the “study of human populations.” There has been newfound attention on building human-centered systems informed by collective interaction behavior (i.e. pluralist interaction signals), but the ways that these are informed is an underexplored area of study. This talk explores the different layers of developer ecosystems—from the software licenses that govern open-source software, to the models that developers use, the harnesses they use them in, and the software that is then generated from these ecosystems. While studying Hugging Face or GitHub might seem different from studying Cursor traces or software library indexes, these exist within different but related structures of developer ecosystems and are best studied in tandem.